Case Number 23923

BREAKING BAD: THE COMPLETE FOURTH SEASON (BLU-RAY)

The Charge

Opening Statement

One of the best TV shows the medium has ever produced has what might just be
its best season yet.

Facts of the Case

Possible spoilers for the first three seasons of
Breaking Bad ahead:

As Season Four begins, chemistry teacher-turned-meth kingpin Walter White
(Bryan Cranston, Larry Crowne) and his assistant, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron
Paul, The Last House on the Left) are being held hostage for a murder
they committed as leverage against Gus (Giancarlo Esposito, Do the Right
Thing), the chicken restaurant owner and drug lord who is forcing Walt and
Jesse to cook for him. It's not the last tight spot Walt and Jesse will find
themselves in this season. This is the season Walter and Gus go to war. The
season that Walter's wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn, Deadwood), gets in deeper
with Walter's business and finds herself running into IRS trouble thanks to her
boss, Ted. The season in which Jesse finds a new mentor in Gus's hatchet man
Mike (Jonathan Banks, Beverly Hills Cop). The season in which Walter's
brother-in-law, the now paraplegic Hank (Dean Norris, Lethal Weapon 2),
begins to find his way back to police work.

This is the season of "Face Off," an episode of television unlike any you've
ever seen.

Breaking Bad: The Complete Fourth Season (Blu-ray) gives us all 13
episodes on three discs...

The Evidence

By now, you've probably heard that AMC's Breaking Bad is one of the
best shows on television. It is. Some might say it's one of the best shows ever
to appear on TV. It might be. Still others would argue it's the definitive best
series in television history, even besting out HBO's The Wire for the top
spot. I might not go that far, but I will say Breaking Bad is truly
outstanding television -- a show any serious fan of the medium should be
watching.

Season Four may be the best Breaking Bad has produced, though it may
not seem that way at first. Showrunner Vince Gilligan, taking a page from The
Sopranos, has constructed this season as a real slow burn -- viewers who get
antsy and complain about "nothing happening" in the first six or seven episodes
will be richly rewarded in the back half. All of the groundwork has been laid,
the tension mounts (by the time we get to "Crawl Space," one of the best
episodes the show has ever produced, it's almost unbearable), and things start
to pay off in ways no one could have imagined.

And yet there's a dark but inescapable logic to the universe of Breaking
Bad that makes us re-examine all of the show's many surprises. When you
think about them, they're not really surprises after all. Things unfold exactly
as they must, according to the nature of these characters. That makes the show
unpredictable, but always playing fair. We should be able to predict all of its
hard left turns, and yet we cannot. Perhaps that's because our minds don't work
the way these characters' minds work. If they did, we would all be Walter White
(yes, I'm aware all of the episodes are written by writers who are not Walter
White, but let's overlook that fact so the point can stand). Not only does
Season Four unfold in shocking and sometimes horrible ways, but there is an
inevitability to the events that hits like a punch in the stomach. A character
like Walter's wife Skyler can make small compromises that lead to large ones,
without ever realizing the path she's on. Before she knows it, she's right down
in the muck with everyone else.

Breaking Bad has always been about the decay of the soul, and Season
Four takes several of its characters to darker places than ever before. Bryan
Cranston's Walter White, in particular, remains the single best antihero since
Tony Soprano; in many ways, Walter is an even darker character than Tony. At
least Tony Soprano had a kind of morality to him. Sure, he engaged in murder,
crime, and terrible acts of violence, but for the most part he behaved according
to a code. Walter, on the other hand, is willing to do just about anything to
anyone. And while he once was able to justify his actions by rationalizing that
he was simply looking to take care of his family's future, those justifications
have slowly eroded away. A decent man can only do so many bad things before he's
just a bad guy, and Walter White has long since crossed that line. In his war
with Gus -- which somehow manages to reinvigorate a show that hadn't even gone
stale -- it becomes obvious Walter isn't interested in preparing for his
family's future. He just wants to control things. He wants to WIN.

Not only is Breaking Bad a truly great show, but Sony has seen fit to
give it a truly great HD release. All 13 episodes are presented in full
1.78:1/1080p high definition, and though it looks very good, the transfer is not
without some issues. Detail, for one, is uneven throughout, with a kind of
smeary softness that creeps in from time to time. It also suffers from some
obvious banding and edge enhancement. The series looked flawless when it aired
on AMC, so why the image has been tampered with for its Blu-ray release remains
a mystery. Much better is the lossless DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track, which
expertly recreates the dialogue and provides incredible surround dimensionality
in all channels. This is a highly cinematic show, and the audio presentation
reflects that, even if the video doesn't consistently do the same.

Where Breaking Bad: The Complete Fourth Season (Blu-ray) really
shines is in the special features department. Every one of these 13 episodes
gets a commentary track from a rotating lineup of cast and crew, including
everyone from series creator Vince Gilligan to stars Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul,
and Betsy Brandt; guest director David Slade (Hard Candy); writers,
producers, composers, cinematographers, and more. So many aspects of the show
are discussed, from the general to the incredibly specific, that fans will come
away with a good idea of just what goes into making the show and why it works as
well as it does. A number of deleted scenes are offered, as are some extended
and alternate versions of scenes that managed to make the final cut. Each disc
in the set also contains featurettes, several of which cover similar territory
discussed in the commentaries. So if you don't have time to work your way
through 13 hours of commentary tracks, the featurettes offer a more manageable
alternative. There are three "Inside Breaking Bad" collections, each of
which are made up of interviews, behind-the-scenes pieces and episode recaps. On
the third disc are the more in-depth featurettes: "The Sets of Breaking
Bad," "The Real Family of Breaking Bad," "The White House," "Great
Chemistry," "The Science of a Hit Show," "Inside the Explosive Finale," "Color
Me Bad," "The Invisible Driver" and "Superlab Tour." We also get a gag reel, the
"Better Call Saul" commercials starring Bob Odenkirk, and 13 video podcasts, one
for each episode. The podcasts are exclusive to the Blu-ray set, but most of
their content is covered elsewhere in the special features.

Closing Statement

I have a hard time definitively declaring Breaking Bad to be the best
show on TV, as that title could just as easily belong to Mad Men or
Game of Thrones, depending on what kind of season each show is having.
But it doesn't even matter. The fact that this series is part of that
conversation proves it's pretty spectacular -- one of the best acted, best
written, best directed series of the last 30 years. Season Four's addition of a
truly worthy adversary for Walter White gives Breaking Bad some of the
best material it's ever had.